Thorsten Bauer was a keynote speaker at the MAB14, invited by our partner ONLYGLASS GMBH. In his presentation he will talk about “media architecture”.

URBANSCREEN is a Bremen based creative company, internationally known by their large-scale projections on urban surfaces.

Christoph Sodemann met Thorsten Bauer in Bremen and talked with him about his views on media architecture and current projects of URBANSCREEN. “URBANSCREEN takes a special part in the field of media architecture. We have an artistic approach and come from the content side. During the past years we developed highly artistically driven temporary installations and projection mapping.”

“Through our experience we have a specific point of view to media architecture. In Aarhus I’d like to show some works and our standpoint how we think content for permanent installations should be developed.”

“We really have to make up our minds how to deal with media architecture, especially in terms of over-information at the public space. You can point out a lot of critical aspects. We have to figure out a clever way how to deal with media facades and permanent installations.”

“Klubhaus St. Pauli in Hamburg is one of our new projects, where you really can play out the power of media facades.“

In May 2013, The Confederation of Danish Industry (DI) moved back into their rebuilt headquarters at Raadhuspladsen in the heart of Copenhagen. The extensive architectural task has been carried out by Transform who has redesigned the physical manifestation of the DI.

The new exterior part of the building consists of a great media façade, as a beacon of aesthetics in a sea of visual noise flowing in and around one of the most heavily trafficked intersections in Copenhagen. A team consisting of Kollision, Martin Professional and Transform worked with DI in designing and developing a language of light in line with the DI brand, exploiting the diagonal nature of the LED-structure on the façade.

The new exterior part of the building consists of a 4,000 m2 media façade, as a beacon of aesthetics in a sea of visual noise flowing in and around one of the most heavily trafficked intersections in Copenhagen.

The different light designs have been turned into generic plugins that fit into Kollision’s player-system. These light plugins can be controlled by the graphical department at DI who can tweak and modify parameters like speed, colors, and direction creating thousands of different expressions – still within the limits of each plugin. The team behind the project has worked on developing a design manual for how the dynamic content of the façade can change during day, night, seasons and special occasions.

As part of the media façade Kollision created the interactive plugin, ‘Urban Canvas’ that allows by-passers to interact with the façade by using their smartphones. By entering a mobile website, users can paint on the façade by swiping their finger across the touch screen of their smart phone, instantly painting with light on building. Multiple users can use the system simultaneously; creating a busy and playful collaborative artwork that keeps on changing. The ‘Urban Canvas’ was developed in dialogue with DI and implemented for the first time at ‘Culture Night 2013’ in Copenhagen.

Ben Stricker, Wolfgang Leeb, members of the Media Architecture Institute, talk about the installation called City bug report, created for the city hall tower of Aarhus. They equipped the railings of four floors in the tower with LED strips. This setup allowed to display some low-res images in different sides of the building. They successfully tackled all the challenges related to the installation of more that 4000 LEDs from AHL on the tower. For that they got the help from the production team of CAVI in Aarhus. Installing power and signaling across different floors proved to be a demanding task, that took about three days to be completed. However they succeeded in their attempt and the installation became a reality.

Jaimie Allen talks about the doctoral consortium at the Media Architecture Biennale. He mentions that the consortium is a forum where people coming from different backgrounds and departments can meet and discuss about topics that are shared. It is an opportunity to transgress the rigid structures of the university and talk in a relaxed environment about the own research and experiences. For example persons working on Interaction design or electronics can talk with people looking at public spaces.

Alexander Wiethoff, Martin Tomitsch, members of the Media Architecture Institute, talk about the workshops of the Media Architecture Biennale. There is a broad spectrum of workshops formats, including industry, hands-on, and studio tours. In a way they represent that Media Architecture is a broad field, that includes media artists, researches at HCI and local designers. The workshops are a platform to communicate and exchange ideas about media, technology and architecture in the city. The interdisciplinary collaboration is a key aspect of the workshops, and they represent an opportunity to exchange ideas, knowledge and include such into to the own practice.

Alexandros Tsolakis and David Bajt from United Visual Artists talk about the working process at U.V.A. and how the creative process is steered to achieve the best results. Brain storming plays an important role in their work process, it allows them to collect ideas which are later distilled and polished by the team. They also talk how model building and prototyping work also plays an important role in the creative process, and getting away from the computer can boost actually improve the results and accelerate the testing of ideas. Especially lighting can be better tested through models, as lighting simulation can be a time intensive activity that nevertheless does not delivered the best results.

In this video Dr. Gernot Tscherteu talks about the exhibition of the Media Architecture Biennale. He mentions that the exhibition has become a meeting place for designers, architects, and academics working in the area. He also explains that the projects exhibited at the Media Architecture Biennale are also available online, or through an iPad app. You can visit the online exhibition at catalog.mediaarchitecture.org

In this video professor Sanxing Cao talks about Media Architecture in China. In such a big country like China there are big differences between the different cantons. Sanxing Cao talks about three main trends in the development of media in China. Smart media, which is the integration information and communication technologies into common media systems, the second one is called ambient media, which encompasses media facades and outdoor media that can be found in common environments, the last one is natural media, which is much more focused on the interaction of humans and media devices.

The projected media façade of the Klubhaus St Pauli will offer Hamburg’s entertainment district an extraordinary spectacle of artistic light – and video installations. With the construction of this project hamburg will get a pioneering landmark, a new attraction for the citizens and visitors of the city.

The entire facade of the Klubhaus St Pauli is divided into three areas. The middle area is made of metal plates that will be controlled according to the content displayed in the LED screens. Another part will be designed as a low-res screen, i.e. with a large pixel pitch to obtain a contrast to the third area, which will have equipped with a high-definition display. ONLYGLASS, a German company specialized in transparent display solutions, is responsible for the high-resolution part, integrated directly into the glass panels of the lift. The resolution will be about 1100 Pixel/m², roughly 50.000 Pixel for the elevator facade.

The use of glass allows a high degree of transparency, both from the inside as well as from the outside. While the lift’s passengers will have a beautiful view of the St. Pauli’s center, from the outside the city will enjoy the visuals of a high-resolution screen, capable of showing videos and pictures. This dynamic façade will become an outstanding example for media architecture in Germany.

ONLYGLASS will present a prototype of the Media Facade at the Media Architecture Biennale 2014. We are looking forward to see their technology!

Societal flows and processes become analyzed and visualized on urban media facades through using data which is generated by digital sensor networks and infrastructures that underlie our daily lives.

Challenging questions:
How can we make social, environmental and inter-cultural processes visible and use the screens as black boards and visualization zones? What is the impact on the society, when invisible structures that underlie our daily life get visualized? What is the potential to create public awareness?

Call for proposals for the visible city 2015

Our today’s modern cities are hybrid structures in which technology is invisibly interwoven in the perception layers of our everyday lives. With the curatorial theme of InVISIBLE and VISIBLE Cities we want to develop an awareness on the changes which are hardly visible to the eyes and are underlying our nowadays cities.

We call for artistic scenarios to visualise invisible, embedded ‘smart’ urban infrastructures and analyse their impact on the technological transformation of our society in a broad and public discourse.